Tag Archives | Conspiracy Theories

Bill Gates is a usual suspect when it comes to fear mongering amongst New World Order conspiracists. He appears to have enhanced that reputation with his latest pronouncements, according to Inquisitr:

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates may be the the richest man in the world, but he apparently envisions a global government as a goal for the future. This prospect has New World Order conspiracy theorists buzzing about the potential for the one world government being pushed by the Gates Foundation.

In a related report by the Inquisitr, Brazil’s Eike Batista managed to go from one of the world’s richest men to the very first negative billionaire within a period of only several years. Some New World Order conspiracy theories claim the Illuminati devil horns were spotted at the 2015 Grammy Awards.

There are many Bill Gates conspiracy theories. One of the oldest was the claim about a hidden code in Microsoft Windows that secretly proclaimed Gates’ identity as the bible’s anti-Christ.

Alex Abad-Santos at Vox explores one of the more interesting conspiracy theories: reptilians. “The idea of shape-shifting lizards taking human forms in a plot to rule America and the world has become one of the most majestic and marvelous conspiracy theories created by mankind (or lizardkind, if you will).”

Last November, the political fate of America was once again put to a vote. But for the millions of Americans who believe in lizard people, this vote had bigger implications — like thwarting an ongoing plot of world domination.

The idea of shape-shifting lizards taking human forms in a plot to rule America and the world has become one of the most majestic and marvelous conspiracy theories created by mankind (or lizardkind, if you will). In 2008, “lizard people” found its way onto the Minnesota’s midterm ballot with some controversy.

As pundits continue to extrapolate on what the Republican win in the midterms means for the country, there are people around this country who hope their votes did something crucial — kept the country safe from lizard people for the next few years.

Conspiracy theories and money go together like … [fill in the simile]. From Bloomberg View:

Friday’s jobs numbers were big, and the revisions below the surface were huge. Yet even before the release, the birther/vaxxer/flat-earther crowd had warned us about phony numbers. As public policy, this kind of conspiracy thinking can cause the deaths of infants and the elderly. At least in markets, it merely loses you money.

Today’s column is about stupidity. Perhaps that’s overstating it; to be more precise, it is about the conspiracy-theorist combination of bias, innumeracy and laziness, with a pinch of arrogance thrown in for good measure.

I am talking about the manifold ways various economic reports get misinterpreted, sometimes in a willful and ignorant manner.

That column discussed some of the sillier theories from within the darker corners of the Internet. Admittedly, these weren’t from influential people or important media outlets; it was the usual collection of oddballs in tinfoil hats.

The Paul family has a special relationship with the Federal Reserve “Bank” and it continues with Rand Paul’s Audit the Fed rhetoric. From Wonkblog:

Rand Paul has either uncovered one of the biggest scandals in the history of this country, or just invented a new conspiracy theory.

Rand Paul by Gage Skidmore (CC)

I’ll give you one guess which it is.

The backdrop is Paul’s “Audit the Fed” bill, which is really an intimidate the Fed bill. The fact is, the Dodd-Frank financial reform already audited the Fed’s past emergency lending, and requires it to disclose any such future lending, too. Not only that, but the rest of the Fed’s balance sheet is already audited by the Government Accountability Office, the Office of the Inspector General, and independent private auditors. That’s not good enough for Paul, though, who also wants to “audit” the Fed’s monetary policy decisions. Basically, he wants Congress to look over the Fed’s shoulder and second-guess whether it should have raised rates or bought bonds.

Joel Achenbach is frustrated that you don’t believe everything that scientists tell you. He’s going to call you irrational if you don’t buy in. Or a conspiracy theorist. Or derogatory term du jour, an anti-vaxxer. He vents at National Geographic:

There’s a scene in Stanley Kubrick’s comic masterpiece Dr. Strangelove in which Jack D. Ripper, an American general who’s gone rogue and ordered a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, unspools his paranoid worldview—and the explanation for why he drinks “only distilled water, or rainwater, and only pure grain alcohol”—to Lionel Mandrake, a dizzy-with-anxiety group captain in the Royal Air Force.

…On Tuesday, Ms. Lee’s publisher announced its plans to release that novel, recently rediscovered, which Ms. Lee completed in the mid-1950s, before she wrote “To Kill A Mockingbird.” The 304-page book, “Go Set a Watchman,” takes place 20 years later in the same fictional town, Maycomb, Ala., and unfolds as Jean Louise Finch, or Scout, the feisty child heroine of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” returns to visit her father. The novel, which is scheduled for release this July, tackles the racial tensions brewing in the South in the 1950s and delves into the complex relationship between father and daughter.

You probably won’t find too many kids with fake guns bursting into TV studios in the United States demanding airtime, mostly because people with real guns would be likely to shoot them. In Europe, on the other hand, not that many people carry guns, so Dutch teenager Tarik Z actually made it on air in Holland (he was also a lot better dressed than most of his American counterparts).

The Telegraph reports that he’s really into some of the classic conspiracy theories, like the Freemasons and New World Order:

Former classmates of a teen who stormed the studios of Dutch national TV demanding airtime before being arrested described him on Friday as a “normal guy”, but one fascinated by conspiracy theories.

“Clever, pleasant and a bit of a loner, but certainly not a crazy guy,” one of the 19-year-old’s former classmates at Delft Technical University told the daily Algemeen Dagblad.

Another former classmate told the NOS public broadcaster, where the drama played off, that the teen, seemingly normal, had a rich imagination and was “often in his own world.”

“In recent years he was interested in conspiracy theories involving the Free Masons and a ‘new world order’,” the student said.

Did you hear the one about the Russian Woodpecker? Newsweek tells the tale:

Dormant for a decade and a half, the Russian Woodpecker appeared to return in December 2013. Once, the notorious tapping of the massive Soviet over-the-horizon radar had frustrated and puzzled Western radio operators, who could discern neither the origin nor purpose of the strange signal. It was coming from somewhere behind the Iron Curtain; its frequency, 10Hz, made some think it was intended for mind control. In 1981, an NBC newscaster wondered, “Are they trying reduce us to a zombie stumbling and groping around and waiting to be told what to do?” And, no, he wasn’t hosting Weekend Update on Saturday Night Live.

Even after the fall of the Soviet Union, the 14,000-ton military radar installation in northern Ukraine, near the border with Belorussia, has remained a mystery to outside observers, largely because it sits right next to the Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station, where a reactor meltdown in the spring of 1986 rendered the surrounding area uninhabitable for the next, oh, several thousand years.

Tom Jacobs reports that “new research finds those on the political extremes are more susceptible [to conspiracy theories] than moderates,” at Pacific Standard:

As we noted last year, belief in conspiracy theories is surprisingly common. So who is particularly susceptible to falling for these often-outrageous narratives?

New research from the Netherlands suggests the answer is people on the political extremes.

Those on both the far right and far left tend to “adhere to their belief system in a rigid fashion, leading them to perceive their political ideas as the simple and only solution to societal problems,” writes a research team led by psychologist Jan-Willem van Prooijen of VU University Amsterdam.

“Conspiracy beliefs feed into a core feature of political extremism, namely a desire to make sense of societal events through a set of clear-cut assumptions about the world.”

This in turn “induces them to perceive evil conspiracies as causal explanations for various events,” they conclude in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.

It seems that no mass murder or terrorist event can occur without a variety of “false flag” type conspiracy theories immediately circulating from the usual suspects. The Week summarizes some of the Charlie Hebdo theories:

Islamophobia to blame

Turkish prime minister Ahmet Davutoglu was among those marching in Paris on Sunday, but the next day Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan told a press conference that the wrong people were being blamed, reports the Financial Times. “The duplicity of the West is obvious. As Muslims we have never sided with terror or massacres: racism, hate speech, Islamophobia is behind these massacres,” he told reporters. “The culprits are clear: French citizens undertook this massacre and Muslims were blamed for it.”

Israel behind the massacres

Still in Turkey and Melih Gokcek, the mayor of Ankara, had a different theory. He claimed that Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, was “definitely behind such incidents” in an effort to “boost enmity towards Islam”.